The philosophies of men mingled with the philosophies of women.

Parenting Taboos – Part 1

With Father’s Day here, maybe it’s a good idea to talk about parenting Taboos. Parents Rufus Griscom and Alisa Volkman (I guess she didn’t take his last name–maybe that’s another taboo) gave an interesting Ted Talk (episode 3 available on Netflix) where they discussed parenting taboos. I created a transcript, and here’s what they had to say.

Alisa, “So this is where our story begins, the dramatic moment of the birth of our first son, Decklin, obviously a really profound moment. It changed out lives in many ways. It also changed our life in many unexpected ways, and those unexpected ways we later reflected on, that eventually spawned a business idea between the two of us, and a year later we launched Babble[.com], a website for parents.”

Rufus, “Now I think of our story as starting a few years earlier.”

Alisa, “That’s true.”

Rufus, “You may remember we fell head over heels in love.”

Alisa, “We did.”

Rufus, “We were at the time running a very different kind of website. It was a website called Nerve.com, which was–that tagline was ‘literate smut.’ It was in theory and hopefully in practice a smart online magazine about sex and culture.”

Alisa, “It spawned a dating site, but you can understand the jokes that we get. Sex begets babies. You follow instructions on Nerve and you should end up on Babble, which we did and we might launch a geriatric site as our third, we’ll see.”

Rufus, “But for us the continuity between Nerve and Babble was not just sort of the life stage thing, which is of course relevant, but it was really more about our desire to speak very honestly about subjects that people have difficulty speaking honestly about. It seems to us that when people start dissembling, people start lying about things, that’s when it gets really interesting, about the subject that we want to dive into. We’ve been surprised to learn as young parents that there are almost more taboos around parenting, than there are around sex.”

Alisa, “It’s true, so like we said, you know the early years were really wonderful, but they were also really difficult. We feel like some of that difficulty was because of this ‘false advertisement’ around parenting. You look at–we subscribe to a lot of magazines and did our homework, but really everywhere we were surrounded by images like this, and we kind of went into parenting expecting our lives to look like this. This sun was always streaming in, our children would never be crying, I would always be perfectly coiffed and well-rested. In fact, it was not like that at all.”

Rufus, “When we lowered the glossy parenting magazines that we were looking at with these beautiful images, and looked at the scene in our actual living room, it looked a little bit more like this. These are our three sons, and of course, they’re not always crying and screaming, but with three boys, there’s a decent probability that at least one of them will not be comporting himself exactly as he should.”

Alisa, “Yes, you can see where the disconnect was happening for us. We really felt like what we had kind of went in expecting, had nothing to do with what we were actually experiencing. So we decided that we really wanted to give it to parents straight. We really wanted to kind of let them understand what the realities of parenting were in an honest way.”

Rufus, “So today what we would love to do is share with you four parenting taboos, and of course there are many more than four things you can’t say about parenting, but we would like to share with you today four that are particularly relevant for us personally. So the first,

Taboo #1: You can’t say you didn’t fall in love with your baby in the very first minute.

I remember vividly sitting there in the hospital, we were in the process of giving birth to our first child…”

Alisa, “We, or I?”

Rufus, “Uh, I’m sorry. Misuse of the pronoun. Alisa was very generously in the process of giving birth to our first child…”

Alisa, “Thank you.”

Rufus, “and I was there with the catcher’s mitt, and I was there with my arms open. The nurse was coming at me with this beautiful, beautiful child, and I remember as she was approaching me the voices of friends saying, ‘the moment you put the baby in your hands, you will feel a sense of love that will come over you that is an order of magnitude more powerful than anything you have ever experienced in your entire life. So I was bracing myself for the moment, the baby was coming, and I was ready for this Mack Truck of love to just knock me off my feet. [Shows picture of Mack Truck.]

Instead, when the baby was placed in my hands, it was an extraordinary moment. This picture was literally a few seconds after the baby was placed in my hands and I brought him over, and you can see our eyes were glistening. I was overwhelmed with love and affection for my wife, with deep, deep gratitude that we had had what appeared to be a healthy child, and it was also kind of surreal. I mean I had to check the tags. I was incredulous. Are you sure this is our child? This is all quite remarkable.

But what I felt toward the child at that moment was deep affection, but nothing what I feel like now, 5 years later. So we’ve done something here that it heretical. We have charted our love for our child over time. This, as you know, is an act of heresy. You’re not allowed to chart love. The reason you’re not allowed to chart love is because we think of love as a binary thing. You’re either in love, or you’re not in love. And I think that in the reality, love is a process, and I think that the problem with thinking that love as something that’s binary is that love causes us to be unduly concerned that love is fraudulent or inadequate, or what have you. And I think I’m speaking here to the father’s experience, but I think a lot of men do go through this sense in the early months, maybe the first year that their emotional response is inadequate in some fashion.”

Alisa, “Well, I’m glad that Rufus is bringing this up because you can notice where he dips in the first year, where I think I was doing most of the work.

But we like to joke, in the first few months of our children’s life, he was Uncle Rufus.”

Rufus, “I’m a very affectionate uncle, very affectionate uncle.”

Alisa, “Yeah, and I often joke with Rufus when he comes home that I am not sure that he would actually be able to find our child in a lineup amongst other babies. So I actually threw a pop quiz onto Rufus.”

Rufus, “Oh!”

[Shows slide of 6 baby faces.]

Alisa, “I don’t want to embarrass him too much.”

Rufus, “That is not fair.”

Alisa, “But I am going to give him 3 seconds.”

Rufus, “It’s a trick question. He’s not up there, is he.”

Alisa, “Our 8 week old son is in here somewhere, and I want to see if Rufus can actually quickly identify…”

I enjoyed being pregnant. I loved it. I felt incredibly connected to the community around me. I felt like everyone was participating in my pregnancy all around me, tracking it down until the actual due date. I felt like I was a vessel of the future of humanity. That kind of continued into the hospital. It was really exhilarating. I was showered with gifts and flowers and visitors. It was a really wonderful experience.

But when I got home, I suddenly felt very disconnected, and suddenly shut in, and kind of shut out. I was really surprised by those feelings. I didn’t expect it to be difficult, have sleepless nights, constant feedings, but I did not expect the feelings of isolation and loneliness I experienced. I was really surprised that no one had talked to me that I was going to be feeling this way.

I called my sister, whom I’m very close to and had three children, and I asked her, ‘why didn’t you tell me that I was going to feel this way, that I was going to feel incredibly isolated?’ And she said, I’ll never forget it, ‘It’s just not something you want to say to a mother that’s having a baby for the first time.'”

Rufus, “And of course we think it’s precisely what you really should be saying to mothers who have kids for the first time.” (audience applauds) This is of course one of the themes for us, that we think that candor and brutal honesty to us collectively being great parents.

It’s hard not to think that part of what leads to this sense of isolation is our modern world. So Alisa’s experience is not isolated. You see here 58% of mothers report feelings of loneliness. Of those, 67% are most lonely when kids are 0-5, probably really 0-2. In the process of preparing this, we looked at how some other cultures around the world deal with this period of time, because here in the western world, less than 50% of us live near our family members, which is part of why I think this is such a tough period. So to take one example among many, in southern India, there’s a practice known as jholabhari in which the pregnant woman, she’s 7 or 8 months pregnant, moves in with her mother and goes through a series of rituals and ceremonies, gives birth, and returns home to her nuclear family several months after the child is born. This is one of many ways we think other cultures offset this kind of lonely period.”

I’m going to stop here for now, and I’ll continue with part 2 later. What do you think of these taboos? Are Alisa and Rufus correct? What are some other parenting taboos that we don’t talk about?

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Published by Mormon Heretic

Mormon Heretic has been blogging since January 2008 at his own blog, Mormon Heretic. In 2009 he was invited to join Mormon Matters, and joined Wheat and Tares in 2010. He is married with three kids, is active in the LDS Church, a returned missionary, and a member of the Mormon History Association and the John Whitmer Association.
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Hence why I’m glad to be all but DONE (my youngest being 14, the others all grown and gone) with the kiddies…don’t get me wrong, I really do enjoy my grandchildren, but the nice thing about being “Grandpa” is you rent, not buy! Even my beloved Snips acknowledges that thoughts of cranking up the oven for one more ‘unit’ (at her age, 47, probably won’t happen and would be high-risk if it did) are ill-advised as neither of us has the strength to deal with a kid on a full-time basis well into our 60s and 70s. I salute Abraham and Sarah (100 and 90, respectively), for their perseverance and almost inhuman stamina.

I’m not convinced these are things that everybody feels and just dares not talk about. I think it’s more that everybody’s experiences are different and we don’t all experience things the same way. And even to the extent that we do, we often choose to focus on different aspects of the experience.

I think Mormon culture (here I go, projecting my experience as general) actually helps in this way because our wards tend to roll a lot of disparate people into one community. On the other hand, there is an expectation among Mormons that things are often hard and we need to suck it up. Like pioneers, you know.

Michael Ballam’s father loved sports, but Michael of course loves opera. I think I’m like Michael’s father, and my son is like Michael. Sometimes it’s hard to relate to your children when they’re so different from you.

As far as LDS culture goes I agree completely that anything painting stay at home motherhood in a negative light can be taboo. I mean you can talk about some of the difficulties, but for a Mormon woman to flat out admit that she doesn’t enjoy the overall experience of being a stay at home mom. . . that is highly frowned upon. That’s not to say that no one ever says it, it’s just one of those conversation stoppers. It’s not highly discussed. If you bring up a portion of stay at home motherhood that is hard for you, but present the overall message that you love it, that’s completely socially acceptable.

I remember taking my child home for the first time, and carrying him in the house. I thought “what am I supposed to do? I usually give a baby to someone else when I’m flummoxed, and they know what to do! I’m clueless! Where’s the user manual???”

I tend to think the word “taboo” is a bit strong, but I agree with EBK that saying anything negative at church about stay-at-home-mothering, particularly among women, is frowned upon. Some women have made great sacrifices: their education, their financial security, their identity, their happiness, and they don’t like hearing that others didn’t do the same. Misery loves company. Not that all motherhood is misery, but career women can be mothers, too, and have their own set of miseries. It’s dumb to get into mommy wars, IMO. Mormonism does a generally great job of giving support to all kinds of parents, except those whose fathers are called into leadership roles.

#5,7 – no kidding. The dilemma faced by both parents, but fathers often trip themselves up over it, is that a child has to be him/herself and not a little carbon copy of Mom/Dad. My older girls were very much tomboys likely b/c I had a greater hand in raising them. My youngest…definitely NOT a tomboy, and more ‘artistic’. And she comes up with challenges that the older ones never put me through…or maybe as Cosby put it, I’m an older man trying to get into Heaven. I parented the older kids when I was younger and meaner, and I must confess I’ve gotten soft in my dotage. I get grief from all the older kids, most having given me grandchildren by now, “You would NEVER have let us get away with THAT!”.

#8 – A mother is a mother whether she’s gainfully employed outside the home or not. Had it both ways with both wives (not at the same time, mind you, not THAT brand of ‘LDS’), and regardless of whether I had a so-called ‘working’ mother or not as wife, I worked my ever-loving fanny off, either to take up the ‘slack’ at home or to bring in extra dough, or both. And I’m NOT complaining. Both parents, if conscientious, do what they have to do to sustain the family.

Kate Kelly has publicly announced that she has no plans to have children. Now of course she could change her mind, but there seems to be a strong taboo for women that their highest calling should be a mother, so Kate is definitely breaking a Mormon taboo there. (I have another Facebook friend who has made the same pledge.) Of course we give latitude to women who can’t conceive, but we think that no good Mormon woman would purposely choose not to become a mother.

MH #11 — could it be because the commandment to have children (according to prophetic leadership) is still in force? It’s one thing to not have children because of physical, mental or emotional health challenges. It’s quite another to not have children simply to be defiant.

IDIAT: I don’t know Kate Kelly’s reasons. Maybe it’s defiance. I only wish Susan Smith had been so defiant! Two of my closest friends have not had children (both are past child-bearing age now). Both had been told they would have difficulty conceiving due to physical problems. One was also sexually abused in her first marriage and didn’t feel suited to motherhood. Neither one was too broken up about not having kids, but to assume defiance as the motive when a woman chooses not to have children seems a bit harsh. Not everyone is suited to motherhood.

I didn’t exactly take to it like a duck to water, and early on I wasn’t sure I wanted to have kids until one day I suddenly wanted to have kids. I certainly didn’t grow up thinking how wonderful it would be. It’s a terrifying prospect for some of us. You literally walk through the valley of the shadow of death, and then you have the responsibility (many would say women get the lion’s share of it) to make this tiny lump into a fully functional independent adult. It’s a daunting thing to take on.

My intention as a parent has been to allow my kids to see the effort involved in parenting, to allow them an encounter with real people who love them. Results are as various as the kids so far, but it’s been important to me not to set up my kids for a sense of failure as parents.
Parenting is the toughest thing most of us will do, challenging us to the very fibre of our beings and this doesn’t end when they leave home. in some ways relationally it gets more difficult. I think knowing this allows us to respect parenting and childcare for what it is, and to give it the attention it deserves in public policy.

Hawk – to clarify, I certainly don’t make it my business to question people about their procreative capacities. However, if a member, especially one sealed in the temple, were to invite the inquiry by publicly setting forth their reasons for remaining childless, then I would have to ask them how they reconcile their reasons with the prophetic counsel. Like I said, there are a myriad of legitimate reasons why a couple might not have children. I, too, don’t know her reasons. If I implied it’s because she is being defiant then I misspoke. I once read a post on a feminist site where allegedly otherwise healthy (at least by their own assessment) sisters gave all sorts of reasons why they wouldn’t have children, none of which related to mental, emotional or physical health. (I guess you could say that not wanting to experience weight gain or stretch marks could be a physical reason, or the desire to spend most of one’s time traveling the world to be a mental health reason). It was as if they were non-members who had never studied the words of church leaders.

Sadly enough, had she reconsidered and spared her sons she might be a grandmother by now. As it is, she’s eligible for parole in nine years. The irony is that she fabricated a story that some black man had carjacked her 1990 Mazda and kidnapped the little boys. With the memories of one Willie Horton (remember the 1988 Presidential campaign?) fresh in public memory (and just to be clear, NOT the long-time Detroit Tiger slugger!), the public was at first outraged at this apparent carjacking/kidnapping, then far more outraged when the sad truth came out. I hope in 2024 that fabrication and appeal to racism is remembered by the parole board.

MH, if that was your point, you might as well say it’s taboo to publicly speak against church leaders or church doctrine. Is it taboo for a feminist to suggest that having an abortion could significantly affect a woman’s mental health? Is it taboo for an NRA member to suggest that handguns are too easy to get? If you’re a member of an organization advocating a thing, yes, it’s taboo to speak against that thing.

#16 – Correct-a-mundo. Childlessness as a CHOICE by a fertile couple is most definitely frowned up. “Denying tabernacles” to the “choice spirits”. Look, I’m not mocking the counsel of the Church leaders, but it seems self-evident that guilt-tripping a reluctant couple into parenthood is counterproductive.

I am one of 60+ cousins, just on my mother’s side. So I grew up thinking that not only is having kids the highest calling, but that the more the better. I thought big families were awesome. At BYU, I was surprised to learn that many of my female friends (I’m not being sexist here, the only friends of mine who expressed this sentiment were female, I don’t know why) who came from big families didn’t want to have a big family because they felt that they didn’t get as much attention as they wanted as children. This opened my eyes. Later, as most of my friends had children, I was equally shocked to hear some friends share sentiments that they didn’t enjoy parenting as much as they thought they would, or at all. GASP! I was shocked again! But I am grateful that these people were honest with me, and it saddens me that due to taboos some may hide their true feelings or do things they don’t want to do just because that’s what they are supposed to do or pretend to like something just because they are supposed to like it. It saddens me that this pressure to be a parent and enjoy being a parent exists. I think parenting is like anything else, it’s not for everyone. But so many believe that it is for everyone, it’s hard to be honest about it.

IDIAT: I’m not sure we’re in disagreement really. I suppose that there is a lot of prophetic counsel that people don’t necessarily implement in their lives. Ultimately, advice is advice. Our life choices are up to us. If someone has a second set of earrings or doesn’t wear a white shirt on Sunday or gets divorced or remains single or sells alcohol in their job, all those are things that may be “taboo” for discussion I guess. But they are personal choices. I don’t see that it’s anyone’s business outside of the people involved. There’s a lot of Gladys Kravitzing in this church sometimes.

Hawkgrrrl, are you saying that is how the church and its members are or that is how the church and its members should be?

I wish the LDS church were a place where “advice is advice” but that is not the case. I like your attitude, and I wish the church were the way you are describing it, but it’s not.

Second set of earrings, divorce, marriage, kids, etc., should be no one else’s business, but tons of members fret about other member’s level of obedience on these issues.

And having kids is not just advice. The church had made it clear that it is a commandment. Not only having kids, but not that long ago (and perhaps still) the church gave constant counsel (by revelation) to young couples to not only have children, but to not wait to have children. The church also used to give strong counsel for mothers to stay in the home, which I for one can tell you impacted my childhood negatively. I think the church has backed off this to a large degree but the ever present commandments of the church on when to get married and when to have children, etc, etc, etc, is more than just advice, in my opinion.

Again, depending on what you meant, we may be totally agreeing here. I wish the church were how you described, and it certainly has moved more in that direction.

Dexter: “I was surprised to learn that many of my female friends… who came from big families didn’t want to have a big family because they felt that they didn’t get as much attention as they wanted as children.”

I guess I may fit in this category as the eldest of 7. It’s not just the attention thing though. As the eldest I felt I had already done more than enough baby-care, nappy changing, child-care etc., and I wanted to get away from all that. I recall spending much of my time in youth saying I didn’t want children, to the shock of the other young women at church, and I was in no hurry to marry. Once I did marry it was 3 years before we had our first child, and another 2 1/2 years before our second. We have just the two children, and I find that enough to cope with. I’m not good at spreading myself thin or juggling competing demands. I’d far rather have just the two and feel I’m doing things properly, and can give them the attention they need.

I don’t understand why there seems to be such an urgency in some quarters in the church not to be ““Denying tabernacles” to the “choice spirits”.” (quoting Douglas) What’s the hurry if time is just a thing of mortality, and there’s eternity to follow? Isn’t it better to raise fewer successful kids who can in turn do the same, than to condemn countless children to … It might take a little longer, but why would that matter?

#22,24 – one of my fave characters from that show (well, they were fairly much all great, Sol Saks hit a grand slam with that show, and I preferred ‘Derwood’ no 2…). It seems there’s one like her in any given LDS ward, doesn’t it?

Folks, the prospect of bearing and rearing children, let alone the proverbial ‘quiver full’ of them, is understandably a daunting proposition. Hence why I get a tad ‘miffed’ when well-meaning but overbearing Church members put undue pressure on the child-less, which isn’t always by choice, but if so, still a CHOICE. We do have this concept called ‘Free Agency’. I find the best thing is to mind one’s own business and let nature take its course. And be willing to put one’s self out there to help out with the grandchildren, even IF you’re just “renting”.

Sometimes even the ‘best’ of us are less than sterling when it comes to shouldering our parental responsibility. An example is of a man whom I otherwise admired as a technological tour-de-force, but shake my head at his apparent reluctance to be a Dad. However, it’s good to learn that ultimately he did, and seems to have mended his relationship with his daughter before he passed on. When you get down to it, monies, possessions, and honors are fleeting, but relationships endure forever.

I agree with many of the early comments before we all got sidetracked whining about how we can’t (or can; no one’s really sure) kvetch about certain parenthood-related things in the Church. I don’t know to what extent the two things mentioned in the TED talk are “taboo,” since I hear them among the non-members with whom I am surrounded all the time. Since I don’t, thank heavens, live in Happy Valley or its clone colonies, I think I may be observing homo parentus in its americanus subgenus without the LDS mutations, and frankly, both of the attitudes called “taboo” by these two speakers are discussed with some frequency.

Now, I do have an “in,” especially among mothers, because I’m an older married man who clearly dotes on his wife and 5 kids – I’m pretty non-threatening and women generally feel comfortable discussing parenting issues with me. Like me, many men with multiple kids (and many women as well) have had different levels of attraction or attachment to their kids at the moment of birth. My oldest son was largely a curiosity to me, although I was perfectly comfortable handling a baby (I have a sister 15 years younger). I was instantly smitten by my oldest daughter. I love them both, but still have different relationships with them. (Not “more” or “less,” just “different.”) Each of my kids affected me differently at birth and as their personalities developed. Many parents, especially with more than one child, discuss these things. When we had #1, The Wump, we thought that This Was What Having Kids Was Like. When Goober came along, we realized there were two ways for kids to be. When Fluffy Muffin showed up, it finally dawned on us that they are all different, and we react to each of them differently – just like they were real people. 🙂

I suspect that Taboo #2 may be less pronounced among active Church members, with higher incidences of SAHMs and activities like visiting teaching, but it’s still something I’ve heard discussed. I do see that in the survey the speakers cite, only 58% of women note the phenomenon; it’s hardly global. Yet (and it’s hard for me not to think of our speakers as somewhat self-absorbed) they paint it as a Large Societal Issue rather than as something which you MIGHT feel (about a 50/50 chance) and which you can probably mitigate by having a support network.